Jennie turned to the door. “I must go. I am going totell those girls not to sneak in here tonight, for those extra lessons. You do not want to risk forcing Mrs. Ludlow into making a choice, Padua.”
“Skipping a night or so might be wise.”
After Jennie left, Padua knelt beside her bed. She reached under it for a valise she stored there. Opening it, she removed a little purse that held her money.
These coins had a purpose, but she doubted now that she would ever save enough to pay for her passage to Italy, and to her namesake city, where her mother had studied and her parents had met. Not when these coins were required to pay for the lawyers to help her father now, and to procure him what little comfort she could while he lived in his current abode.
She had saved almost enough once before, when she was younger and teaching at the school in Birmingham that she had attended as a student herself. After three years of scrimping, she had the passage. Then she had met Nicholas and fallen in love. Beautiful, glorious love. The kind of love her mother and father had known, and about which poems are written. She had loved totally, freely, and without guilt or worry.
Three months later Nicholas was gone, with her money in his pocket.
She stared at the coins. Her father had been cold to her for ten years, ever since her mother had died when Padua was fifteen. He had sent her away to that school then, at a time when she wanted to be with what family she had left. She had only seen him a few times ayear since then, even after she moved to London in order to be closer to him.
He did not want her help. He did not even want her company. She should just leave, and go to Padua and apply to the university and make her mark if she still could. Papa might even respect her then.
Her mother’s voice came to her, frail and trembling from the consumption taking her life.He is like a child, Padua. You must promise me you will watch over him, as much as he will allow. For a man who has traveled extensively and read the great books, he knows almost nothing about surviving in the world.
A long sigh escaped her.Oh, Mama, what a promise to demand—to care for a man who did not love her. To demand a place in his life when he would prefer she had none.
She thumbed fifteen shillings aside, then returned the rest to the valise.
***
Given a choice, most lawyers would never sully themselves with criminal law. The result was those who did usually were the lawyers who could not find something more lucrative to do.
Ives was a rarity, a lawyer who argued criminal cases out of a sense of duty. There was no criminal bar, and his colleagues in the endeavor consisted of a motley assortment of lawyers whose primary work involved other courts and pleadings. Like him, only on occasion did they arrive in regalia at the Old Bailey orother criminal courtrooms to lend their eloquence and legal knowledge to the deliberations therein. Solicitors, sergeants—there was no limitation on who appeared to defend.
If one saw a trained barrister in the Old Bailey or Newgate Prison, most likely he served as prosecutor, either one hired by the victims or by the state. Some judges now allowed the accused to have lawyers, too, but not all did. In many cases judges held to the tradition that a defendant could provide his own defense by simply speaking the truth.
Today Ives entered Newgate by way of a door through which most of those other lawyers were never received—that of the house of the gaoler, Mr. Brown. Being Lord Ywain had its privileges. Within minutes he was sitting in Mr. Brown’s office, explaining his purpose.
“Belvoir is being held here, while further investigations are pursued,” Mr. Brown confirmed. “He has been here going on four weeks.”
“If charges have been laid or are imminent, I would like to know what they are.”
“Coining, it was. It will be the noose for him, or at best a life on the hulks.”
Ives was not sure what he had thought the crime would be. Something political he supposed. As an intellectual, to hear his daughter describe him, Mr. Belvoir was the sort to take to radical ideas and company, and get swept into some misstep against the laws in place to control that sort of thing now.
“What is the evidence?” Coining, or counterfeitingmoney, was among the most serious offenses. Counterfeiting undermined the health of the economy, and was viewed as a type of treason.
“Caught him red-handed, is how I hear it,” Brown said. “Found the bad money in those rooms he keeps on Wigmore Street.”
This was not looking good for Hadrian Belvoir. Ives expected he would dispatch the entire trial in less than an hour. “What has he said for himself?”
“Well, now, that is the rub. He hasn’t said anything. Magistrates and others keep asking him, and he refuses to cooperate. Unwise of him, isn’t it? He might garner some mercy if he turned on his colleagues in crime. You know how that works, sir.”
He did indeed. Criminals laying down information about other criminals was the oil that made the wheels of the criminal courts turn.
“We even showed him the old press in the yard, to frighten him. Usually the mere threat of torture works wonders,” Brown said. “With this strange one, nothing. If anything he became more stubborn.”
“Strange, you call him. Is he perhaps demented?”
“I wouldn’t say so. As for strange, well, come see for yourself.”
The gaoler rose. Together they walked into the prison proper and its long corridors of cells, or wards.
Enough of a breeze penetrated through the small windows today so it did not smell as bad as it might. Still, when hundreds of people crammed damp cells, the mereodors of humanity’s existence became concentrated and offensive. The smell of human waste alone overwhelmed the senses. Add to that the effects of unwashed bodies, rotting food, and the almost sweet odor of illness, and it produced a mix strong enough to leave men retching.
